The chastened will
Of virtue sees that justice is the light
Of love, and not revenge and terror and despite.[50]
That same night the tyrant with the aid of a foreign army treacherously attacks the revolutionists. In the midst of the carnage
A black Tartarian horse of giant frame
Comes trampling o’er the dead; the living bleed
Beneath the hoofs of that tremendous steed
On which like to an angel robed in white
Sate one waving a sword.[51]
Needless to say, this is Cythna who comes to rescue Laon. They both flee to a lonely ruin where they recount to each other the stories of their sufferings. Cythna tells that she was carried to a submarine cavern by order of the tyrant, and that she was fed there by an eagle. She became a mother, and was comforted for a while by the caresses of her child until it mysteriously disappeared. An earthquake changed the position of the cavern, and Cythna is rescued by some passing sailors. She is taken to the city of Othman, where she leads the revolutionists as described in the previous cantos. Want and pestilence follow in the wake of massacre, and cause awful misery. An Iberian priest in whose breast “hate and guile lie watchful” says that God will not stay the plague until a pyre is built and Laon and Cythna burned upon it. An immense reward is offered for their capture. The person who brings them both alive shall espouse the princess and reign with the king. A stranger comes to the tyrant’s court and tells them that they themselves have made all the desolation which they bewail. However, he cannot expect them to change their ways so he promises to betray Laon if they will only allow Cythna to go to America. The tyrant agrees to the stranger’s terms, who then tells them that he is Laon himself. He is placed upon the altar, and as the torches are about to be applied to it Cythna appears on her Tartarian steed. The priest urges his comrades to seize her, but the king has scruples about breaking his promise. She is set on the pyre, however, and both perish in the flames. They wake reclining—
On the waved and golden sand
Of a clear pool, upon a bank o’ertwined
With strange and star-bright flowers, which to the wind
Breathed divine odour.[52]
A boat approaches them with an angel (Cythna’s child) in it. They are all carried in this “curved shell of hollow pearl” to a haven of rest and joy.
This disconnected story serves as a vehicle to convey exhortations regarding liberty and justice. Thus, during the voyage from the cavern to Othman’s city, Cythna delivers an address to the sailors which contains some of the best passages in the poem. She tells them for example:
To feel the peace of self-contentment’s lot,
To own all sympathies, and outrage none,
And in the inmost bowers of sense and thought,
Until life’s sunny day is quite gone down,
To sit and smile with Joy, or, not alone
To kiss salt tears from the worn cheek of woe;
To live as if to love and live were one;
This is not faith or law, nor those who bow
To thrones on Heaven or Earth such destiny may know.[53]
The poem aims at kindling a virtuous enthusiasm for the doctrines of liberty and equal rights to all. “It is a series of pictures illustrating the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence” and the regeneration of humanity. Laon is the expression of ideal devotion to the happiness of mankind; and Cythna is a type of the new woman, “the free, equal, fearless companion of man.” The poem depicts “the awakening of an immense nation from their slavery and degradation to a true sense of moral dignity and freedom; the tranquillity of successful patriotism and the universal toleration and benevolence of true philanthropy.” It concludes by showing that the triumph of oppression is temporary and a sure pledge of its inevitable fall.
So much attention is here given to The Revolt of Islam because of the influence on it of a love story—The Missionary, by Miss Owenson—an influence which up to the present has escaped the notice of Shelley students.[54] In a letter to Hogg, dated June 27, 1811, Shelley writes “the only thing that has interested me, if I except your letters, has been one novel. It is Miss Owenson’s Missionary, an Indian tale; will you read it? It is really a divine thing; Luxima, the Indian, is an angel. What a pity we cannot incorporate these creatures of fancy; the very thoughts of them thrill the soul! Since I have read this book, I have read no other.”[55] This tale is a very striking one, and it is not strange that Shelley made its philosophy his own. The descriptions are so vivid, the tale so simple, and the experiences recorded apparently so true, that it takes a maturer mind than Shelley’s to lay bare the fallacies of the work and to unmask its half truths. No outline of the story can give an idea of its strength. In the beginning of the seventeenth century Hilarion Count d’Acugna of the royal house of Braganza joins the Franciscans, and on account of his zeal and piety is known as “the man without a fault.” He is full of zeal for the salvation of souls and goes to India to convert pagans to Christianity. “Devoted to a higher communion his soul only stooped from heaven to earth, to relieve the sufferings he pitied, or to correct the errors he condemned; to substitute peace for animosity ... to watch, to pray, to fast, to suffer for all. Such was the occupation of a life, active as it was sinless.” Passages like the above serve as sugar coating for the following: “Hitherto the life of the young monk resembled the pure and holy dream of saintly slumbers, for it was still a dream; splendid indeed, but unsubstantial, dead to all those ties which constitute at once the charm and the anxiety of existence, which agitate while they bless the life of man, the spring of human affection lay untouched within his bosom and the faculty of human reason unused within his mind.... Yet these feelings though unexercised were not extinct; they betrayed their existence even in the torpid life he had chosen, etc.” The missionary spends some time at Lahore studying the dialects of Upper India under the tutelage of a Pundit. During his stay there the Guru of Cashmere comes to Lahore for the ceremony of Upaseyda. He is accompanied by his beautiful and accomplished granddaughter, Luxima, the Prophetess and Brachmachira of Cashmere.